Read Online Cursed Inheritance by Kate Ellis - Free Book Online

soul.
    As he walked towards Kirsty Evans’s apartment he noticed that at least half the people he passed were black. In Tradmouth he was generally in a minority of one but here he was just one of a crowd. A shaven-headed white man was approaching him, staring boldly. He wore a Millwall football shirt over a stocky torso bulging with gym-honed muscles and his hairy arms bore some fine examples of the tattooist’s art. As this human pit bull terrier passed, he brushed against Wesley’s arm and shot him a hostile glance before spitting on the ground. Wesley averted his eyes and hurried on. Trouble was something he didn’t need right now.
    Kirsty Evans lived in what appeared to be a converted industrial building. Wesley could see the walls of the foyer through the plain glass front door: they were rough bare brick, featureless and functional. Like some kind of prison. Or a monastery where the brothers lived particularly austere lives. He pressed the button marked Evans and a weak voice wafted from a stainless steel speaker. Kirsty Evans sounded like a frail old woman, but grief can drain the life force from even the liveliest personality.
    When the door lock was released, Wesley made his way slowly up the cold concrete stairs and found Kirsty Evans waiting at the open door to her apartment - a tall steel door, double her height. Wesley’s first thought was that she looked like a lost little girl. She wore no make-up on her pale face and her fine blond hair was scraped back into a makeshift ponytail. Her eyes were large, blue-grey and bloodshot. She had been crying, which was hardly surprising in the circumstances. Wesley hovered on the threshold for a moment, lost for words and wishing Rachel Tracey was there with him to shoulder the burden.
    Once he had introcuced himself, Ki(sty led him inside and invited him to sit down on a long low, black leath~r sofa. It wasn’t comfortable but Wesley hardly noticed: his mind was on other things.
     
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    The interior of the apparment was as bare as the rest of the building. This was minimalism. And although the chaos in Wesley’s house constantly irritated him, he preferred it to this place with its white walls, floor to ceiling windows and stainless steel. It would be like living in an operating theatre - or Colin Bowman’s mortuary. But he knew that such clinical surroundings didn’t come cheap.
    ‘I’m very sorry about your husband,’ he began.
    ‘You’re sure it’s him?’
    He glanced at a photograph in a stainless steel frame that stood on a sleek beech sideboard. A wedding photograph, taken outside a picturesque country church that looked somehow incongruous in these starkly urban surroundings. Kirsty smiled out at the camera, elegant in her simple ivory gown, while the dead man beamed by her side in his morning suit.
    ‘We’re pretty certain, yes. But we’d like you to come to Devon to identify him, if you’re feeling up to it. Unless there’s someone else you’d like … ‘
    She sank down into a deep leather armchair, hugging a suede cushion as though it were a baby. ‘No. I want to see him.’ She suddenly looked up, her eyes red and moist with unshed tears. ‘When the policewoman came last night to tell me, I thought it couldn’t be Paddy. He’s been all over the place. He can take care of himself. He’s lived round here for five years and he’s never even been mugged. And he’s been in bloody Bosnia, for God’s sake. He knew the score. Nothing could happen to him in a place like Devon. The policewoman’ said he’d been found in a river. Is. that right?’ .
    ‘Yes but…’
    ‘Do you know what happened? Did he fall in or … ‘
    ‘We don’t know what happened yet, I’m afraid. But we are treating his death as suspicious. I’m sorry.’ .,She shook her head. ‘That’s impossible. It must have been an accident.’
    Wesley opened his mouth to say something but the right
     
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    words evaded him. ‘What was he doing in Devon?’ he